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You've missed a few things, arguably, but hardly worth the time to sift through it. In compliance with blog rules I won't name anything as that could be read as suggestions; instead, I'll simply observe that for the most part most of the things I'd name would be one-offs, where the stars aligned and somebody with some taste all but pulled one over on the powers that be. There's very few veins of consistent quality in the past fifteen years. Not... quite... zero... but close enough.

Pixar is arguably the most consistent of those examples. Whether they can survive acquisition by Disney is apparently still an open question... which is actually a bit to their credit as I rather expected the answer to be "obviously not" by now. On movie-making timeframes the acquisition is still young, of course.

4
A recently-produced episode of the Bojack Horseman series mentioned two characters who paid some pre-schoolers $10,000 for the movie rights to "Tag". The tag(heh)-line is something like "He was it. Now you're it."

5
I wish I understood what it was about The Lego Movie that made it such a hit. So many people seemed to love it, and it just left me feeling "eh."

The last movie I saw in the theaters was Moneyball, perhaps the least-likely bit of source material ever used for a Hollywood movie. Who'd go to see a film about a MLB general manager and his assistant "inventing" a new way to value player talent?

Enough that it more than doubled its $50M budget. Us baseball fans, we've got wallets.

6
"I wish I understood what it was about The Lego Movie that made it such a hit."
Plenty of parents with kids at the playing with Legos age, looking for 'safe' movies to take their kids to, that have enough humor adults will appreciate. The Lego movie just hit that sweet spot.
Suspect I'll get dragged off to the Minecraft movie, too. Hope it's not utter dreck.

3
Now Steven... you know perfectly well that Rule 34 exists for a reason: someone somewhere finds it erotic.

Plenty of people would lust over her. I've had one gf that would
approximate Pochaco's shape, and of all of them that I've had over the
years, she was the one that enjoyed life the most if you know what I
mean and I'm pretty sure you do, wink wink nudge nudge.

Which probably explains why she dumped me after a few months. I was a
right miserable bastard back then, to be honest, and she went a long way
towards fixing me.

And before you say it, yes I'm still a right miserable bastard... I was worse back then.

July 24, 2015

Could it? Entirely possible. Right at the moment we don't know of anything that forbids it.

Has it? We have no idea and it will be a long time before we can find out.

Also, keep in mind that "life" and "tool-using life" are not synonyms. Life has existed on Earth for more than 3 billion years (IIRC it's actually been more than 4 billion), and for nearly all that time it was exclusively single cell.

Tool using life only appeared here a couple million years ago, a mere blink of the eye in geological terms. (Reasonably advanced tool users, by which I mean "metal users", only go back maybe four thousand years.)

Eventually someone is going to suggest beaming radio at this particular planet, and it can't hurt to do so. But the chance of it making any difference is painfully small.

1
I think NASA (it might have been some other group) are looking for exoplanets with spectroscopic signatures for both methane and oxygen. You can get either one from physical processes, but if you have both together in an atmosphere it's a pretty good sign of biology at work. That's something we might realistically hope to find in our lifetimes.

July 18, 2015

The spice of danger

Jules Bianchi died today. He was in a horrible accident last October in the Japan Grand Prix at Suzuka racetrack, and never woke up. In private email this afternoon, Wonderduck said, "It'll happen again. It may be 20 more years but it'll happen."

And he's right. They do the best they can to make racing safe, and perhaps that's why this is the first driver death since Senna died 21 years ago. But he's right: it'll happen again.

Thinking about that, it occurred to me that for some sports the risk is part of the attraction. We're not Romans attending the Gladitorial Games expecting to see men butchered; it's not like that. But the knowledge of the risk adds tension and interest. It's part of what makes us human. And as a result a lot of sports do in fact have an element of risk, in some cases quite a lot.

And this doesn't just attract the audience. It attracts the participants, too. Indeed some sports do not have audiences, such as "free climbing". That refers to people who climb rock faces without the benefit of any safety equipment: no ropes, no pitons, no nothing. If they make a mistake they fall and are crippled or killed. The degree of danger is entirely a function of what you're climbing, and some cases are preposterously perilous.

Traditionally Motocross is considered the most dangerous sport for participants, not so much because of the risk of dying as because of the amount of cumulative damage it does to the riders over the course of a career. They're doing things to their body routinely that we are not designed to have done to us. (At least it was traditional when I was younger. Now I'd have to vote for bull-riding.)

High speed motorcycle racing on a track give me the willies. If a race car driver loses it in a corner, well, he's inside a safety cage and has lots of equipment in there for purposes of keeping him alive in the resulting crash. But if a motorcycle rider loses it, he's right there out in the open. The only thing between him and the ground is his suit, and that won't keep him from breaking his neck if he starts to roll.

And it does happen. Not every race, not necessarily even every year. But it does happen. The people participating know this -- and for a lot of them it's (a small) part of the attraction.

Don't ask me to explain it because I can't. Maybe it's the same thing that makes people ride roller coasters and watch horror movies. (Neither of which I do.) It's a danger rush, and for those actively risking life and health it's probably an even bigger rush.

But it's real, and it's part of the sport. If car racing was perfectly safe it probably wouldn't be as popular, either with the audience or with the drivers. No one wants to watch a driver die, but part of the attraction is the knowledge that it could happen.

Which doesn't change the fact that it's a tragedy when someone finally dies.

It's telling that some F1 drivers these days believe the cars are too safe, too easy to drive with fewer repercussions when you break out the cordless drill to do some work on your pooch. You don't get into motorsports either as a fan or a participant if you don't like the feel, the sounds, the smells, and the speed involved.

But the cliche of "only watching it for the accidents" didn't become a cliche because it was a joke. There's an element of truth to it. Heck, one of my favorite time wasters is watching yootoobs of motorsport crash compilations. But that's because I know that the drivers aren't dying in them.

Thrillseekers go out and do these sort of things for the rush. Those of us who aren't crazy watch them and get a similar feeling while sitting in our comfy chairs.

In my time as an active F1 fan, I've never had the unpleasant experience of having a driver die. There have been a couple of times I've expected to hear that news... Robert Kubica in Canada, for example, but it's never happened. I never thought it wouldn't happen again, but I think I (and F1 in general) might have become complacent about the possibility.

There is, or soon will be, a technological way to make car racing perfectly safe. The driver controls the car remotely; he isn't inside it during the race. He sits in a control booth (like at an arcade) and sees what's happening on video screens. If the car crashes, he isn't harmed.

He could even get physical feedback by making the booth be tilt-turn (like the "Star Tours" attraction at Disney MGM in Florida).

DARPA is developing this technology as we speak for purposes of remotely controlling unmanned fighter jets.

4
Of course, that doesn't protect the spectators from a car that's totally out of control. But if you know there isn't any driver in the car you can change how you design the race track (and the cars themselves) to minimize the amount of shrapnel leaving the circuit.

My own experience with racing was somewhat unfortunate. After a couple of close calls I think it's much safer to fly from California to New York in a light single VFR in the winter than to do 5 laps in a formula car. I received more injuries from crashing a Formula Ford than by crashing my Carlson Sport Special (coincidentially both vehicles were totaled).

After watching Initial D, I borrowed a real car and ran an excellent mountain road that I have just out of town (it's used to supply a restaurant that someone built at the summit). One run was enough to realize that touge is suicide in modern cars no matter how twisty the road is. I was hitting 70 mph for braking into hairpins and I only had 206 hp. Fade there and it's the curtains.

2
OSU is the cow college, and also has a better engineering department. Also, it's where my Dad went to school and where he met my Mom.

UO has a reputation for being hippy-dippy, at least by comparison to OSU.

For all my nasty comments, there are a lot of things OSU does right. It's got a big Agriculture school and a big school of Forestry. I mentioned the Oceanography department; they've got a facility in Newport and a big research ship that's at sea a lot of the time. (There's a highway that runs straight from Corvallis to Newport, about 80 miles over the Coast Range, so it's convenient.)

Of course, all my memories are from 40 years ago; I have no idea what it's like now. A couple of months ago I "drove" up Campus Row on Monroe Street (via Google Earth) and didn't hardly recognize anything.

July 16, 2015

Why?

Why in hell is a recruitment center for the US Marines designated as a "gun free zone"?

Today four US Marines in Tennessee paid for that with their lives. A young man named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who was born in Kuwait, shot up an Army recruiting center and then a Marine recruitment center and then himself died.

Not yet clear if he killed himself or was shot by police. What we know for certain is that he wasn't shot by the Marines because they didn't have any guns.

UPDATE: This is entirely too reminiscent of the 2009 Ft. Hood shooting. Which was even more egregious: why is an Army base designated as a gun-free zone?

I think every soldier should be required to wear a loaded sidearm at all times when in uniform, whether on a base or not. (Unless they're carrying an even heavier weapon.) If we don't trust them with guns, why in hell do we even have a military?

UPDATE: "We will treat this as a terrorism investigation until it can be determined that it was not.” Well, at least that is progress. Used to be they'd deny it was terrorism until it became blatantly obvious that it was.

But maybe it's just that when the attacker is named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez we've already crossed the "blatantly obvious" threshold...

1
The people making policies like this think EVERYBODY is a loose cannon. Soldiers, police, average citizens. They're reasoning by analogy: They know they're sociopaths who'd as soon kill the people they see around them as say hello, they assume everybody else is as crazy.
They don't trust the police, they don't trust the military, but can't get by without them. So they only arm them when they can't avoid it.

Unless you are CNN, in which case, you are unwilling to infer that the shooter was Muslim based on his name (Which...Might actually make sense IF that was only thing CNN went off the rails on.), as well as saying that shopping malls 'were places you wouldn't anticipate attacks.' No doubt the victims of Westgate would dispute that assertion.

Posted by: cxt217 at July 16, 2015 06:46 PM (JOdbP)

3
To be fair, having soldiers generally disarmed except those on specific duty is hardly new.

Originally it turned on discipline issues. If you issue soldiers guns and ammunition when they don't need it, a percentage of those will go missing as they're lost, stolen, or (most likely) sold. You can easily end up with a unit with 200 men and fifty rifles when the penny drops.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, soldiers are not exactly selected for their retiring, reticent natures - making sure they weren't running around strapped has probably saved quite a few lives over the years.

Of course, what makes sense in the context of an ostensibly-secure military base makes a lot less sense in a shopping mall outlet with a couple desks inside. But I can definitely see the military making that call - culturally, they are comfortable with the idea that soldiers who are not carrying arms as party of their duty at the moment will not be armed.

4
It's unfortunately a rather simple calculation of career risk on the part of commanding officers. Post WWII we kept our officer corps big so we wouldn't have a repeat of the WWII buildup nightmare, so there's an up or out policy, and perfect Officer Efficiency Reports are a necessity of staying in the game and getting promoted instead of being shown the door, perhaps before they can put in the 20 years required for a pension. None could get away with Patton's interwar "This officer would be invaluable in time of war but is a disturbing element in time of peace."

If their unit is attacked, their career will most likely be over. If one of the men under their command has a negligent discharge, their career will be over. The odds of the former are so much smaller than the latter that we end up with travesties where sentries are not allowed to even have magazines inserted in their rifles, they've got to keep them in their pockets, sometimes even with a strip of tape on top. This killed307 in the Beirut barracks bombing, and was widely reported to still be the general policy after 9/11.

So if sentries aren't allowed to be effectively armed, are essentially disposable tripwires, the chances that those inside a base or facility will be allowed to arm themselves is nil. And that's before we get into the anti-gun ethos which a lot of those in the military who are not on the sharp end of the spear buy into. Or look at the bottom line of our men being armed with a known ineffective poodle shooter since the late '70s (M16/M4); the people in charge just don't care.

Side note: based on early reports, it looks like he started his shooting spree at another Gun Free Zone, and the police were already in pursuit when he shot up the recruiting center; like at Ford Hood, the police can avenge you, but can't initially protect you.

Posted by: hga at July 17, 2015 06:07 AM (51wyD)

5
Hga's report is all sorts of horrifying. In the USSR, it was the SOP to keep guns and ammo under a lock and key, in case. Heck the commandant's patrol was armed with detached bayonets in town. Because who knows, what if a soldier flips out and decides to assasinate a Party official? And yet sentry was always armed.

There are some differences: The Red Army's recruits were and still are all drafted, involuntary. And a lot of them (probably about half) came from occupied territories where anti-USSR sentiment ran high (such as Chechnya).

The US Army has been all-volunteer since the 1970's. Morale in the US Army is a lot different than in the Red Army. Our soldiers are there because they want to be, and because they believe in the mission.

The Red Army also didn't train their soldiers (because it cost too much) but our soldiers get a lot of training. See this for more.

Frankly, if I was an officer in the Red Army I wouldn't want my enlisted to be carrying live weapons around me, either. But the US Army isn't the same, and I trust those men completely.

7
<i>Frankly, if I was an officer in the Red Army I wouldn't want my enlisted
to be carrying live weapons around me, either. But the US Army isn't
the same, and I trust those men completely.</i>

*You* trust those men completely. Our political class (including a disturbing proportion of the officer corps) sees those men as unpredictable members of an enemy tribe who serve under them for reasons they cannot quite understand. It's more or less *exactly* the same motive as that of the people in charge of the red army disarming their men: They are afraid of them and what they might do.

I was once in the Air Force for a while, and aside from the ten rounds we fired at field training, we received *no* serious real training in how to handle weapons, nor were we allowed to do so on or near base. (Granted, I was nowhere near the "pointy end" of anything, but still...) I've done more pistol shooting in my free time than I ever did as part of a military organization.

Posted by: EccentricOrbit at July 18, 2015 04:46 PM (GtPd7)

8
In order to meet our weapons training requirement (bureaucracy A checks the box of bureaucracy B, and nothing physical is done), our directorate gave us powerpoint presentations on how to maintain/clean the M-4. I kid you not: a web powerpoint presentation was our weapons training for several years.

Actually, there is a lot about the way the base I was stationed at functioned that disturbed me. One of the things that got to me after a while was the sheer ineffectualness of everything: Nothing worked! Nothing! The security was a sham. The base motorpool didn't actually maintain our dilapidated fleet of rusting to pieces trucks: They filled out paperwork and made sure all the papers were in order, but they wouldn't repair anything. They contracted that out occasionally when it absolutely had to be done, but it wasn't coming out of their budget. (Stories there too of figuring out what to do with a truck with half a brake disc in the middle of nowhere desert southwest...)

The ten thousand odd people busily spent their day turning the crank on a bureaucracy that *did* nothing physical. Whenever something actually needed to happen in the actual real world, it was contracted to private civilian contractors.

July 14, 2015

They've found Cthulhu!

A map of Pluto showed that the names of underworld denizens have been informally associated with the dwarf planet's whale-shaped feature and other dark spots along the equator. The "whale" is nicknamed Cthulhu, after the dark god from H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories. Another spot is called Balrog, after the fiery demon from J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Other spots are labeled Meng-p'o, Krun, Ala, Vucub-Came and Hun-Came — after underworld figures from Chinese and Maya mythology as well as Mandaean and Nigerian Igbo beliefs.

June 24, 2015

Justice is done. Or will be done someday. Maybe

Dzokhar Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death. And maybe, in 20 or 25 years, or 50 if we're still executing people by then, he might get the needle. Or the rope. Or face a firing squad. Or get vaporized by an antimatter beam. Or whatever contemporary fashion dictates.

Assuming capital punishment hasn't been banned outright. Again.

My biggest complaint about the current practice of capital punishment in the US is that the process is entirely too inefficient and too long. The appeal process should be expedited -- and limited -- so that it ends in a reasonable amount of time.

1
Euro guns such as Walthers and Berettas often come with a magazine disconnect to prevent exactly this kind of negligent discharge. Frankly I never thought that it was something that could be engineered out of a gun, considering that it's trivial to insert an empty right back up.